In the final part of our review, we look at system requirements and installing Windows 7
In the third and final segment of our Windows 7 review, we look at installing and upgrading the operating system. For part 1 of the review see here, and for part 2 see here.
Installing Windows 7 is relatively painless and we found it takes about half an hour once you’ve supplied the installer with your language and country settings. After a reboot or two, you should find yourself looking at the clean, mostly empty, desktop of Windows 7 (see screenshot below).
In our tests, the first thing Windows 7 did after installation was ask whether we wanted to set up a HomeGroup network, and supplied a password for other Windows 7 PCs to use when joining the group. It then downloaded and applied any available updates.
System requirements Windows 7 requires a PC with a minimum 1GHz processor and 1GB of memory (2GB for a 64-bit version), plus at least 16GB available disk space. These are similar to the requirements for Windows Vista, but PC hardware has moved on in the three years since Vista was released, and it is now virtually impossible to buy a new PC that does not comfortably exceed these requirements.
In addition, while Vista is sluggish on PCs with less than 2GB, Windows 7 appears to work fine with the 1GB minimum. In tests, we installed it onto a Toshiba netbook (see Installing Windows 7 on a netbook), which had no difficulty running the new operating system on its low-power Atom processor.
Those upgrading an existing PC to Windows 7 will have little to worry about if they are currently running Windows Vista. The same is not true if you are one of the many users still running Windows XP, however, as Microsoft does not offer a direct upgrade path from XP to Windows 7.
Users wishing to upgrade from XP will have to do a full, clean install of Windows 7, which will overwrite everything already on the hard disk. Windows Easy Transfer, a tool built into Windows 7 and available as a free download for XP from Microsoft’s web site, enables users to export files and settings to external storage, then import them back again after the installation.
